Rereading | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/series/rereading
Latest news and features from theguardian.com, the world's leading liberal voiceen-gbGuardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2016Fri, 09 Dec 2016 14:16:29 GMT2016-12-09T14:16:29Zen-gbGuardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2016The Guardianhttps://assets.guim.co.uk/images/guardian-logo-rss.c45beb1bafa34b347ac333af2e6fe23f.pnghttps://www.theguardian.com
Julian Barnes: I was wrong about EM Forsterhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/02/julian-barnes-i-was-wrong-about-em-forster
<p>Put off by A Passage to India in his teens, the author has rediscovered a wry, sly and subversive writer</p><p>If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self. Occasionally I will reread a book in exactly the same copy as I first did decades previously: and there, in, say, a student text of<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/nov/28/madame-bovery-flaubert-lydia-davis-review"> a Flaubert novel</a>, I will find all those annotations which now, initially, embarrass. Key passages underlined, exclamations in the margin of “Irony!” or “Metaphor!” or “Repeated image!” and so on. And yet often, naive and excited as they seem, these comments are pretty much ones I might be making – if not so explicitly – several decades on. That younger reader wasn’t wrong: it <em>was</em> ironic, it was metaphorical, it was a repeated image. I don’t think you are a more intelligent reader at 65 than at 25; just a more subtle one, and better able to make comparisons with other books and other writers.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith">Zadie Smith on EM Forster</a> </p><p>It could have been just coarsely satirical; instead, the tone is perfectly pitched</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/02/julian-barnes-i-was-wrong-about-em-forster">Continue reading...</a>EM ForsterBooksCultureFictionGustave FlaubertFri, 02 Dec 2016 12:30:15 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/02/julian-barnes-i-was-wrong-about-em-forsterPhotograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comPhotograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comJulian Barnes2016-12-02T12:30:15ZJames Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: an antidote to shamehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novel
<p>Garth Greenwell first took solace from James Baldwin’s Paris novel Giovanni’s Room as a teenager. Sixty years after it was published, the prize-winning author acknowledges his debt to a classic of gay literature</p><p>I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first discovered <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/giovanni-s-room.html?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article"><em>Giovanni’s Room</em></a>, but I was quite young, maybe 14 or 15. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there was a wonderful independent bookstore in town, a place called Hawley-Cooke, where, since I was a bookish kid, I spent pretty much every Friday night. This store had a section dedicated to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/17/1000-novels-gay-lesbian-fiction">lesbian and gay literature</a>, tucked away in a back corner, and each time I went I would spend a few sweaty minutes there before I snatched a title and carried it to another part of the store to sit and read.</p><p>I have mixed feelings about lesbian and gay sections in bookstores now, but it was a wonderful resource for the pre-internet kid I was. As a student in Kentucky’s public schools, which means I wasn’t getting much of a literary education, I didn’t have any idea what names to look for. I chose books almost at random, based on their titles, I guess, or their covers, a method that led me to Edmund White, Yukio Mishima, Jeanette Winterson, Baldwin. It’s hard to overstate what those books meant, growing up in the American south, or the solace I took from them and from their vision of queer life as possessed of a measure of human dignity. It didn’t matter that that dignity was so often the dignity of tragedy; it was still a kind of antidote to shame.</p><p>The whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do</p><p>There’s a strange kind of pleasure in disclosing so much of the story up front</p><p>For Baldwin, American identity is a form of defence, a series of myths meant to insulate one from unbearable realities</p><p>“I don’t believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish … And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.”<br>“Oh please,” I said. “I don’t believe that. Time’s not water and we’re not fish and you can choose not to be eaten and also not to eat – not to eat,” I added quickly, turning a little red before his delighted and sardonic smile, “the little fish, of course.”<br>“To choose!” cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me … “To choose!” He turned to me again. “Ah, you are really an American.”<br></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novel">Continue reading...</a>James BaldwinBooksCultureLGBT rightsFictionSat, 19 Nov 2016 13:00:08 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novelPhotograph: Ralph Gatti/AFP/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Ralph Gatti/AFP/Getty ImagesGarth Greenwell2016-11-19T13:00:08Z'We are all Thomas More’s children’ – 500 years of Utopiahttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/04/thomas-more-utopia-500-years-china-mieville-ursula-le-guin
<p>Utopia has inspired generations of thinkers and writers to imagine the good – and evil – humans might be capable of. China Miéville rereads a classic</p><p>If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you&nbsp;too long to reach Utopia. Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at&nbsp;the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds&nbsp;and deep under the earth – but&nbsp;above all they have imagined them&nbsp;on islands.</p><p>The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebius’s Panchaea and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun; Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the anonymous 1616 novel of that name; Bacon’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis" title="">Bensalem</a>; Robert Paltock’s Nosmnbdsgrutt, from <em>The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins</em>; Huxley’s Pala; Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia; and countless others. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.</p><p>Those who rule calmly effect utopias of their own, in which subjects have no choice but to live and&nbsp;serve and die</p><p>The history of all societies is a history of monsters on all sides. Our utopianism is always already a chimera</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/04/thomas-more-utopia-500-years-china-mieville-ursula-le-guin">Continue reading...</a>PhilosophyBooksCultureFri, 04 Nov 2016 08:00:12 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/04/thomas-more-utopia-500-years-china-mieville-ursula-le-guinPhotograph: Matthew Chattle/Rex/ShutterstockPhotograph: Matthew Chattle/Rex/ShutterstockChina Miéville2016-11-04T08:00:12ZWhy Claudio Magris’s Danube is a timely elegy for lost Europehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/why-claudio-magriss-danube-is-a-timely-elegy-for-lost-europe
<p>Written at the end of the cold war, Magris’s Danube glimpsed a common humanity at a time of imminent danger. Thirty years on, its message is even more powerful</p><p>The literature of rivers is small but not without significance. As well as inventing American literature and with it an idea of America, Mark Twain’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/24/100-best-novels-huckleberry-finn-twain"><em>Huckleberry Finn</em></a> invented a new literary form that metamorphosed over the ensuing century into the road novel, in which the older form of the peripatetic novel was united with a modern idea of freedom. This mashup gave such books the force of yearning, an animating hope that at some point acquires the power of myth.</p><p>River books are forever about “lighting out for the territory”, as Huck puts it. And there comes a moment in every river book where we are confronted with a great question: what is the price of our soul? Huck must decide whether to turn in Jim, the escaped slave, or damn his soul – by which Twain really means save it, by defying the conformity to rules and society that otherwise cripple and deform us.</p><p>Magris’s musings on places and moments of history are studded with startling vignettes about writers</p><p>The bulk of the Circassian territory formed a strip along the Danube, near Lom. In that little town there was an agency of the Imperial Steam Navigation Company of the Danube, under the direction of Agent Rojesko, who for weeks on end opened none of his windows overlooking the river, to keep the house free from the stench of the sick and the corpses arriving on ships laden with Circassians suffering from typhus. Records and reports, as well as the testimony of travellers, show Rojesko toiling away tirelessly and courageously to prevent and forestall contagion, to help the refugees, to find them food and shelter, provide them with medicines and work.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/20/uk-will-get-a-hard-brexit-if-may-pursues-tough-approach-hollande">Merkel and Hollande warn May that UK faces 'rough' ride with hard Brexit</a> </p><p>After the refugee crisis and the Brexit vote, Danube speaks of the need for tolerance of differences</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/why-claudio-magriss-danube-is-a-timely-elegy-for-lost-europe">Continue reading...</a>BooksHistoryCultureSat, 22 Oct 2016 11:00:15 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/why-claudio-magriss-danube-is-a-timely-elegy-for-lost-europePhotograph: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty ImagesRichard Flanagan2016-10-22T11:00:15ZWar and peaceful gardens: in the land of Tolstoyhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/15/tolstoy-war-and-peace-gardens-country-estate-yasnaya-polyana
<p>A visit to Tolstoy’s country estate gives writer and gardener Charlotte Mendelson an insight into the relationship between nature and creativity</p><p>Springtime can kill you, but autumn is worse. If one’s soul responds to nature – and, as Louis Armstrong said of jazz, if you have to ask what that means, you’ll never know – then its beauty is painful. Whatever TS Eliot thought (the poor man was wrong about so much), autumn is the most painful time of all. Walking in the grounds of Tolstoy’s country estate at <a href="http://ypmuseum.ru/en.html">Yasnaya Polyana</a>, yellow birch leaves turning gently as they fall, is almost too much, particularly for an oversensitive novelist. Five of us are here, imported by the British Council to broaden Russian conceptions of British literature. We have worked – by God we have worked – but, this morning, among the wooded paths and ripe, rich leaf mould, nothing else seems to matter, not even fiction.</p><p>For cramped city-dwellers, the incomprehensible excess of space is dazzling: the “cascade of three ponds”, each more invitingly cool and swimmable than the last; the fir woods thick with fungal life; the juicy grass. Even the ponies have had a surfeit. There is so much silken birch bark, pinkly tender beneath its epidermis; so many fallen, unregarded apples and ancient, lichen-spattered branches: mustard, pigeon, rose. One wants to sniff and wallow; at least, I do. Surely this is normal? A reasonable response to being knee-deep in the dew and bracken: surrendering to the space, the wildness?</p><p>Tolstoy derided his early works as an awkward mixture of fact and fiction, yet they offer an insight into what made him</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/sep/17/charlotte-mendelson-edible-garden">Salad days: how author Charlotte Mendelson transformed her patio into a garden larder</a> </p><p>Noël Coward described Vita Sackville-West as 'Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below'</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/15/tolstoy-war-and-peace-gardens-country-estate-yasnaya-polyana">Continue reading...</a>Leo TolstoyBooksCultureGardensSat, 15 Oct 2016 10:00:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/15/tolstoy-war-and-peace-gardens-country-estate-yasnaya-polyanaPhotograph: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty ImagesPhotograph: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty ImagesCharlotte Mendelson2016-10-15T10:00:02Z‘The most impure tale ever written’: how The 120 Days of Sodom became a ‘classic’https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/marquis-de-sade-120-days-of-sodom-published-classic
<p>It was once reviled as one of the most sexually violent books ever written and banned in Britain in the 1950s – and now it is a Penguin Classic. So why has the Marquis de Sade’s novel been reclassified as great literature?</p><p>On 3 July 1789, in the middle of the night, the Marquis de Sade was dragged from his cell in the ironically named Liberty tower of the Bastille. Earlier that day he had been caught shouting to the crowd gathered outside the prison walls that the inmates’ throats were being cut. He was transferred to an asylum outside Paris, and forced to leave many of his most precious possessions behind, including a copper cylinder kept hidden in a crevice in the wall. When his wife set off for the Bastille to fetch his belongings on 14 July, it was already too late: the Revolution had beaten her to it, and she had to turn back empty-handed.</p><p>Sade wept “tears of blood” over the loss. Inside the cylinder was a scroll, 12m long and 11cm wide, covered in minute handwriting: the manuscript of an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/marquis-de-sade-scroll-120-days-sodom-paris">unfinished novel called <em>The 120 Days of Sodom</em></a>, or <em>The School of Libertinage</em>.</p><p>There are some books that are not fit for all people and some people who are not fit for all books</p><p>Publishing The 120 Days as a classic changes it still further and makes Sade a little more respectable</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/marquis-de-sade-120-days-of-sodom-published-classic">Continue reading...</a>FictionBooksCultureClassicsFiction in translationFri, 07 Oct 2016 11:01:12 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/marquis-de-sade-120-days-of-sodom-published-classicPhotograph: INTERFOTO / Alamy/AlamyPhotograph: INTERFOTO / Alamy/AlamyWill McMorran2016-10-07T11:01:12ZWhodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floorhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/whodunnit-and-whowroteit-the-strange-case-of-the-face-on-the-cutting-room-floor
<p>The real mystery of this 1930s cult thriller is not its murder, but the identity of its writer. So, asks Jonathan Coe, who was ‘Cameron McCabe’ and what were the facts behind his fiction?</p><p>This extraordinary work of postmodern fakery from the “golden age of detective fiction” was last reprinted 30 years ago, and in the intervening decades has acquired a legendary status. Introducing the book to those who haven’t read it yet, without revealing too many of its various secrets, is not an easy task.</p><p>It would be a terrible breach of protocol, after all, to give away the ending of a mystery story; and yet it would be hard to decide, in any case, what the “ending” of <em>The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor</em> actually is – one of the book’s many peculiar qualities being that the enigmas surrounding it do not come to a halt on the final page.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/16/reading-group-dashiell-hammett-maltese-falcon">Reading group: Dashiell Hammett, dean of hard-boiled detective fiction</a> </p><p>It begins briskly enough … but things start to get weird. You keep expecting the story to move forward and it doesn't</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/whodunnit-and-whowroteit-the-strange-case-of-the-face-on-the-cutting-room-floor">Continue reading...</a>Crime fictionCultureBooksFictionFilmFri, 02 Sep 2016 11:59:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/whodunnit-and-whowroteit-the-strange-case-of-the-face-on-the-cutting-room-floorPhotograph: General Photographic Agency/Getty ImagesPhotograph: General Photographic Agency/Getty ImagesJonathan Coe2016-09-02T11:59:01ZBarbara Skelton: the socialite networkerhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/barbara-skelton-socialite-networker-dj-taylor
<p>Evelyn Waugh gossiped about her, Anthony Powell put her in his novels and Lord Weidenfeld, briefly, married her. She was a writer, a bohemian, a femme fatale – but, on her centenary, DJ Taylor asks who was the real Barbara Skelton?</p><p>Barbara Skelton’s trail runs through a certain type of 20th century literary life like a vein of quartz. Here is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/evelynwaugh">Evelyn Waugh</a>, writing to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/nancy-mitford">Nancy Mitford</a> early in 1950 with a bumper selection of the latest Grub Street scuttlebutt: “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/georgeorwell">G Orwell</a> is dead, and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow. Will <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/01/cyril-connolly-writers-modern-enemies-of-promise">Cyril [Connolly]</a> marry her? He is said to be consorting with Miss Skelton.” Nearly four decades later their mutual friend <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/30/news.obituaries">Anthony Powell</a> was still filling his diaries with news of the journalists who had telephoned to inquire if Barbara was the model for <em>A Dance to the Music of Time</em>’s farouche, man-eating Pamela Flitton (“I replied with guarded affirmation”). The death of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/20/lord-weidenfeld">Lord Weidenfeld</a> earlier this year brought another little flurry of publicity for the woman once described as looking like “the youthful concubine of a legendary Mongol chieftain” along with lurid accounts of their brief yet tempestuous mid-1950s marriage.</p><p>But who was Barbara Skelton, and why should Waugh have gossiped about her, Powell finessed her into his novels and Weidenfeld schemed so craftily to displace her first husband, the literary critic-cum-editor Connolly, from the marital bed? Most of the answers can be found in her highly autobiographical first novel, <em>A Young Girl’s Touch</em>, published in 1956 at the height of the Weidenfeld/Connolly standoff, which tracks her erratic progress through the second world war. Skelton, who was born 100 years ago, features as “Melinda Paleface”, who is thought “far too young and pretty to live in London alone”. She is first seen working at the offices of a continental government in exile, where she devotes her mornings to “doing her face or making dates by telephone with all her friends and admirers” and her evenings to being entertained by them at a variety of expensive restaurants and back-street nightclubs.</p><p>At 17, bored by the routines expected of&nbsp;the rich man’s mistress, she took to model­ling</p><p>They moved to a cottage on the Kentish heights, attended by a vengeful coatimundi, and fought ‘like kangaroos’</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/barbara-skelton-socialite-networker-dj-taylor">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureEvelyn WaughAutobiography and memoirSat, 27 Aug 2016 11:00:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/barbara-skelton-socialite-networker-dj-taylorPhotograph: Baron/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Baron/Getty ImagesDJ Taylor2016-08-27T11:00:01ZOscar Wilde’s De Profundis – one of the greatest love letters ever writtenhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/26/oscar-wilde-de-profundis-greatest-love-letter
<p>Written towards the end of Wilde’s incarceration, De Profundis is bitter, seductive, hurt and passionate. Ahead of a public reading, Colm Tóibín visits the cell in which Wilde put pen to paper</p><p>Early in 1895, while facing charges of indecency and wondering if he should abscond to France, Oscar Wilde had no idea what a two-year prison sentence would mean for him. Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act.</p><p>In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress. Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with them. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/13/oscar-wilde-gift-governor-reading-gaol-auction">Wilde was later to praise Nelson</a>, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”. Nelson was more liberal than his predecessor and was ready to relax the rules.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/26/oscar-wilde-de-profundis-greatest-love-letter">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureOscar WildeFri, 26 Aug 2016 09:00:15 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/26/oscar-wilde-de-profundis-greatest-love-letterPhotograph: The British LibraryPhotograph: The British LibraryColm Tóibín2016-08-26T09:00:15Z'A story with sex and money at its heart': Evie Wyld on I Capture the Castlehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/20/rereading-i-capture-the-castle-sex-money-evie-wyld
<p>From its famous first line to its haunting ending, Dodie Smith’s novel captures the moment a young woman discovers her place in the world</p><p>I don’t remember exactly what I thought Dodie Smith’s <em>I Capture the Castle</em> was about before I read it. I was in my early 30s and it was one of those books I had been dimly aware of as part of the reading landscape of other people’s childhoods, like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/29/fiction.margaretatwood"><em>Anne of Green Gables</em></a>: a perfectly nice thing to read at the time, I thought, but not necessarily something to seek out in later life. I probably assumed it was historical and worthy, some sort of wholesome adventure book. I knew Smith had written <em>The Hundred and One Dalmatians</em>, so there was another connection to childishness. I imagined something with a tinge of Enid Blyton, all pink cheeks, lashings of this and that and people being either absolute bricks or beastly. Then one day I found myself staying in a house without a book to read, saw a copy on the shelf and read the first page.</p><p>“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.”</p><p>The final lines of the book, as Cassandra fills the last space, are a throb of some­thing so nebulous as to be ghostlike</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/20/rereading-i-capture-the-castle-sex-money-evie-wyld">Continue reading...</a>FictionBooksCultureSat, 20 Aug 2016 11:00:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/20/rereading-i-capture-the-castle-sex-money-evie-wyldPhotograph: Allstar/BBCPhotograph: Allstar/BBCEvie Wyld2016-08-20T11:00:02ZPatrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and a slide into the abysshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/06/patrick-hamilton-hangover-square-world-slide-abyss-rereading
<p>Written in the shadow of the approaching second world war, the novel tells the tale of a man at battle with himself and the world around him</p><p>At a distance of nearly 80 years, it is beyond the reach of most of us to know what life must have been like during the summer of 1939, before war broke out. After Chamberlain’s visit to Munich the previous year and the shabby betrayals that followed, the mood seems to have been one of uncertainty shading into dread. The world had escaped calamity once: did anyone believe it could escape again?</p><p>On Christmas Day 1939 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/apr/16/welcomebackpatrickhamilton">Patrick Hamilton </a>began writing <em>Hangover Square</em>, a novel that adopts those agonising weeks and months as its backdrop and brings the reader as close as possible to the feeling of a society – a world – unable to arrest its slide into the abyss. Yet it is another sort of abyss – an entirely personal one – that is the focus of Hamilton’s story. At the very instant we meet his protagonist, George Harvey Bone, he has plunged into one of his “dead” moods, a fugue state in which his mind shuts down and he proceeds through the world as an automaton, an experience akin to “a silent film without music”.</p><p>Hangover Square is a metaphorical place, a stopover on the long and lonely pub-crawl to alcoholic oblivion</p><p>We see George vividly, this large, sad-eyed, shambling man who takes inno­cent pleasure in&nbsp;things yet remains mysterious</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/26/winter-read-patrick-hamilton-midnight-bell">Winter read: The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/mar/12/books.featuresreviews">Pulped fictions</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/06/patrick-hamilton-hangover-square-world-slide-abyss-rereading">Continue reading...</a>FictionBooksCultureSat, 06 Aug 2016 12:00:06 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/06/patrick-hamilton-hangover-square-world-slide-abyss-rereadingPhotograph: Popperfoto/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Popperfoto/Getty ImagesAnthony Quinn2016-08-06T12:00:06ZAlex Garland’s cult novel The Beach, 20 years onhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/02/alex-garland-the-beach-20-years-on
<p>The author’s 1996 debut, about a group of young backpackers who discover an ‘idyllic’ island off Bangkok, captured the late-90s zeitgeist. But does it still thrill?</p><p>In my mid-20s, in the early 1990s, I moved to west London from Scotland. I remember meeting them, at parties in Notting Hill flats, in nightclubs, at raves. They’d be tanned, unshaven and&nbsp;stoned and they’d be saying things like, “No, man, Koh Samui is over. Phuket is just touristville now. You have to go to … ” I was moving among the backpacking, one‑upping, (mainly rich) young things that Alex Garland would skewer in his fiction debut a few years later, when he&nbsp;was, enragingly, just 26 years old. (Enragingly to me, at any rate: I was struggling with&nbsp;the outline for my own first novel, whose eventual publication was still nearly a decade in the future.)</p><p><em>The Beach</em> is a recollection told in the first person (“Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I&nbsp;started writing this book, I tried not to&nbsp;do it”) and it is peppered with cataphoric references (“Considering that two of them ended up dead and the other ended up nuts, I feel bad that their names mean so little to me”): tropes of&nbsp;horror fiction that conspire to create a feeling of dread, a warning about what is to come. Garland’s narrator Richard arrived at the Britpop feast like the Ancient Mariner, had Coleridge’s cipher been raised on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091763/" title=""><em>Platoon</em></a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/the-simpsons" title=""><em>The Simpsons</em></a> and Nintendo.</p><p>For generation X in 1996, there were no wars to fight. Only the war against boredom</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/mar/06/features">Beach boy</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/feb/27/2">Audio: The Beach</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/02/alex-garland-the-beach-20-years-on">Continue reading...</a>FictionAlex GarlandBooksCultureSat, 02 Jul 2016 07:00:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/02/alex-garland-the-beach-20-years-onPhotograph: PAPhotograph: PAJohn Niven2016-07-02T07:00:03ZAlan Hollinghurst on Edmund White's gay classic A Boy’s Own Storyhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/10/edmund-white-a-boys-own-story-rereading-gay-literature
<p>A Boy’s Own Story chronicles a teenager’s journey to adulthood in the 1950s midwest</p><p>A <em>Boy’s Own Story</em> is both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a&nbsp;pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness. “What if,” its narrator wonders, “I&nbsp;could write about my life exactly as it&nbsp;was? What if&nbsp;I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?” The “realism” of the 19th-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a “parallel life”, “tinglingly far-fetched”. Could there be&nbsp;a new realism that faithfully depicted the inner and outer worlds he actually lived in? In the midwest of the 1950s the growing-up of a young gay man is a&nbsp;vulnerable, marginal, barely visible thing, riven by confusion, self-hatred and doubt. Edmund White’s novel, doing justice to all this confusion, tingles none the less with its own excitement: the value, and novelty, the sheer teeming interest, of telling the truth. More than 30 years on, in a culture in which sexual truth-telling is ubiquitous, it retains its power to startle: in the tense insouciance with which it describes a&nbsp;14-year-old’s lust for his father, or his earning money to pay for a hustler; or in the hair-raising betrayal that brings the novel to its close, a wilful act towards which we see the whole narrative has been moving with an awful logic.</p><p>If it changed the rules for what was possible in literary fiction, <em>A Boy’s Own Story</em>, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, also marked a new direction for White, and confirmed the liberating potential of a closely autobiographical kind of novel, where the testamentary force of memoir is coupled with the artifice of fiction. The embrace of such a&nbsp;genre as a career-long practice was a&nbsp;surrender to adventure, undertaken with no knowledge of how the story would continue. It was bound to find its form less in the conventional architecture of plot than in the symmetries of the narrator’s inner world, the driving force of his desires, the selective harmonies of memory. White himself cannot have known, when he wrote <em>A Boy’s Own Story</em>, that he would write the sequels that were to join it in a kind of first-person trilogy, <a href="http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/beautiful.htm" title=""><em>The Beautiful Room Is Empty</em></a> (1988) and <a href="http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/farewell.htm" title=""><em>The Farewell Symphony</em></a> (1998) – books telling a&nbsp;young man’s story, since youth, in the gay world of the 60s and 70s, which seemed magically extended until it was&nbsp;brutally curtailed. We see now that <em>A Boy’s Own Story</em> appeared at a turning point in the history that White’s later books would unfold, just before the Aids virus violently reconfigured the very world he&nbsp;was describing. The trilogy thus has&nbsp;a second personal thread running through it, and intimately connected, the growth not only of a gay man, but of&nbsp;a driven and ambitious writer, of extraordinary gifts, destined to define gay literature for a generation.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/02/our-young-man-edmund-white-review-male-model-fashion">Our Young Man by Edmund White review – sparkling and steamy tale of a male model</a> </p><p>If his first curiosity will&nbsp;be about their sex lives, he is also hungry for the oddities of other people’s life stories</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/29/edmund-white-i-try-to-be-honest-if-i-lose-someones-friendship-so-what-">Edmund White: 'I try to be honest. If I lose someone's friendship, so what?'</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/10/edmund-white-a-boys-own-story-rereading-gay-literature">Continue reading...</a>Edmund WhiteFictionBooksCultureLGBT rightsFri, 10 Jun 2016 08:00:17 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/10/edmund-white-a-boys-own-story-rereading-gay-literaturePhotograph: PR IMage/PR ImagePhotograph: PR IMage/PR ImageAlan Hollinghurst2016-06-10T08:00:17ZAlan Moore celebrates Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer – a nerve-shredding Irish noirhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/03/chris-petit-the-psalm-killer-rereading-alan-moore
<p>Petit’s fictional account of the Troubles was not only a perfectly judged noir novel – it was also a political investigation into a dark period of recent history</p><p>In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/nov/29/top-10-film-noir">film</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/20/top-10-rural-noir-novels-american-fiction">writing</a>, noir – not a colour but a vital absence of the same – is nonetheless a necessary hue. The stark radiance of a composition becomes evident only when it lacks distractions of the spectrum and its gaudy splashes of attached sensation, just as a morally abysmal ground makes any human light displayed against it the more brilliant in the narrative.</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/chrispetit">Chris Petit</a>, as an author, is of a variety that could not have existed prior to the later 20th century and is still exotic – namely someone whose approach to crafting literature commences from a starting point of cinema, where the priorities and processes are very different. Time jumps its sequential tracks and is dismantled, fracturing in the stuck-needle repetition of the retake, shuffled into new chronologies by the demands of shooting schedules, with the semblance of a continuity or plot emerging only in the edit, this being as true of daily news as of a Jason Statham vehicle. Authorial sleights of hand allowed by moving pictures – all that visual background to hide details in; the fleeting blink-and-miss-it nature of the medium itself – cannot be replicated in prose fiction, where there is no background beyond the flat surface of the words, and where those words stay frozen on their paper screen allowing for examination. Text requires its own illusionist’s devices.</p><p>The serial killer is depicted against endless violence and attrition, saying something different and new</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-rereading">Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat – the surprise Turkish bestseller</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/03/chris-petit-the-psalm-killer-rereading-alan-moore">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureAlan MooreThrillersFictionFri, 03 Jun 2016 13:00:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/03/chris-petit-the-psalm-killer-rereading-alan-moorePhotograph: Alex Bowie/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Alex Bowie/Getty ImagesAlan Moore2016-06-03T13:00:01ZSabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat – the surprise Turkish bestsellerhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-rereading
<p>Why has a little known 1940s novel become a Turkey’s bestselling book? Maureen Freely on a writer who refuses traditional gender roles, and offers hope in an increasingly restricted society </p><p>When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943, it made no impression whatsoever. Decades later, when <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/378095/"><em>Madonna in a Fur Coat</em></a> became the sort of book that passed from friend to friend, the literary establishment continued to ignore it. Even those who greatly admired the other works of Sabahattin Ali viewed this one as a puzzling aberration. It was just a love story, they said – the sort that schoolgirls fawned over. And yet, for the past three years, it has topped the bestseller lists in Turkey, outselling <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/orhanpamuk">Orhan Pamuk</a>. It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults. And no one seems able to explain quite why.</p><p>The story begins in 1930s Ankara, the Turkish Republic’s newly appointed capital. The narrator has fallen on hard times, and it is only with the help of a crass and belittling former classmate that he is able to find work as a clerk at a firm trading in lumber. Here he meets the sickly, affectless Raif Bey, who is, we’re told, “the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves: “What do they live for? What do they find in life? What logic compels them to keep breathing?” When at last they make friends, it becomes clear that Raif’s reason for living cannot be his family. The relatives assembled under his roof treat him with the utmost contempt. And yet he welcomes their derision. Even on his deathbed, he seems to accept it as his due. But there is also a notebook, hidden in his desk drawer at work, which he asks his friend to destroy.</p><p>In his last letter to his wife, he boasted that soon he would be writing from Italy, France or England</p><p>Ali was publicly taunted for failing to act like a 'real man'. He never responded to it. Instead, he wrote</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-rereading">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureSat, 21 May 2016 11:00:11 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/sabahattin-ali-madonna-fur-coat-rereadingPhotograph: PR Image/PR IMagePhotograph: PR Image/PR IMageMaureen Freely2016-05-21T11:00:11ZDavid Wojnarowicz: still fighting prejudice 24 years after his deathhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/13/david-wojnarowicz-close-to-the-knives-a-memoir-of-disintegration-artist-aids-activist
<p>Best known for an image on a U2 album cover, the painter and photographer was was also an Aids activist whose message of defiance from the late 80s reverberates in American politics today</p><p>You might not be familiar with the American artist and activist <a href="https://www.visualaids.org/artists/detail/david-wojnarowicz">David Wojnarowicz</a>’s name, but if you’re of a certain age, you have probably seen at least one image by him. His photograph of buffalo tumbling off a cliff was used as the cover of <a href="http://www.u2.com/discography/index/album/albumId/4039">U2’s <em>One</em></a>, taking his art to a global audience a few months before his death in 1992 of Aids-related complications.</p><p>Wojnarowicz was only 37 when he died, but he left behind an extraordinary body of work, particularly considering the uncongenial circumstances of much of his short life. A refugee from a violent family, a former street kid and teen hustler, he grew up to become one of the stars of the febrile 1980s East Village art scene, alongside <a href="http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2003/kikismith/">Kiki Smith</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/goldin">Nan Goldin</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/11/keith-haring-review-the-political-side-of-a-pop-art-legend">Keith Haring</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/basquiat">Jean-Michel Basquiat</a>.</p><p>What does it mean if&nbsp;what you desire is illegal? Fear, fury, yes, but also a fertile paranoia</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/13/david-wojnarowicz-close-to-the-knives-a-memoir-of-disintegration-artist-aids-activist">Continue reading...</a>Autobiography and memoirBooksPhotographyPaintingArt and designCultureAids and HIVSocial exclusionSocietyLGBT rightsThu, 12 May 2016 23:15:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/13/david-wojnarowicz-close-to-the-knives-a-memoir-of-disintegration-artist-aids-activistPhotograph: PR ImagePhotograph: PR ImageOlivia Laing2016-05-12T23:15:01ZThe Sea, the Sea – Sarah Churchwell on the making of a monsterhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/iris-murdoch-the-sea-the-sea
<p>Iris Murdoch’s flawed protagonists are so often blinkered by their own egotism, but The Sea, the Sea’s Charles Arrowby is a bully to beat all others</p><p>In Iris Murdoch’s novel <em>The Black Prince</em>, a popular writer named Arnold Baffin defends his regular production of books he knows are not as good as he’d like them to be: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.” Character here presumably speaks for author, although one also suspects that poor silly Baffin’s platonic conception of a perfect idea is probably less perfect than he thinks. It’s a good bet that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/irismurdoch">Iris Murdoch</a>’s perfect ideas were better.</p><p>A published philosopher whose first book was the first book in English on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/jeanpaulsartre">Jean-Paul Sartre</a>, Murdoch wrote novels of ideas about love, as well as the occasional love letter to ideas. Obsession is everywhere in her fictional landscape, but characters are as likely to be obsessed with art as with sex. Adulteration is the game: nothing remains pure, certainly not fidelity to other people, or to social conventions, even the most deeply held. Her characters are most faithful to their conceptions of themselves, which are almost never shared by those around them. In her essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, Murdoch wrote that the most important thing for a novel to reveal, “not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist”. It was a point she made repeatedly outside her fiction: “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,” as she wrote in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/27/iris-murdoch-letters-sexism">Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?</a> </p><p>Murdoch has shared the fate of Plath and Woolf: the drama of her life contends in the public imagination with her work</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/iris-murdoch-the-sea-the-sea">Continue reading...</a>Iris MurdochBooksCultureFictionSat, 02 Apr 2016 07:00:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/iris-murdoch-the-sea-the-seaPhotograph: Daily Mail/REX ShutterstockPhotograph: Daily Mail/REX ShutterstockSarah Churchwell2016-04-02T07:00:02ZWe’re going to Wem-ber-ley! DJ Taylor on a football classichttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/25/jl-carr-how-steeple-sinderby-wanderers-won-the-fa-cup-football-classic
<p>JL Carr’s 1975 novel about an amateur football team winning the FA Cup might have a Roy of the Rovers plot, but his fantasia on the national game is a rare bulletin from the margins of English life</p><p>JL Carr – Joseph Lloyd, but friends knew him as Jim – died in February 1994 at the age of 81. The <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-j-l-carr-1397014.html" title="">obituaries</a> were long and appreciative, without ever quite getting beyond the bank of fortifications that the deceased had erected before his highly enigmatic personality and the faint air of concealment that hung over nearly every aspect of his life. This, after all, was a man who, when asked to&nbsp;supply jacket copy for an American edition of one of his novels, vouchsafed the single sentence “JL Carr lives in England”, who left bits of fake medieval statuary lying around rural churchyards “to give people something to think about” and whose funeral was enlivened by the last-minute appearance of a young, beautiful, black-clad woman in high heels whom the other mourners strained to identify. According to his biographer Byron Rogers, who lurked amid the horde of journalists, readers, ex-pupils and the ornaments of advisory committees on church architecture, such had been the rigid compartmentalisation of Carr’s eight decades on the planet that nearly all those present had come to bid farewell to different men.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/jl-carr-month-in-country">A Month in the Country by JL Carr | Book review</a> </p><p>It is one of the greatest football novels ever and a penetrating report card from a world where fiction rarely lingers</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/25/jl-carr-how-steeple-sinderby-wanderers-won-the-fa-cup-football-classic">Continue reading...</a>BooksSport and leisureCultureFootballSportFri, 25 Mar 2016 14:00:19 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/25/jl-carr-how-steeple-sinderby-wanderers-won-the-fa-cup-football-classicPhotograph: Daily Mail/REX Shutterstock/Daily Mail/REX_ShutterstockPhotograph: Daily Mail/REX Shutterstock/Daily Mail/REX_ShutterstockDJ Taylor2016-03-25T14:00:19ZTeju Cole on A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul – a novel of full-bore Trinidadian savvyhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/teju-cole-vs-naipaul-a-house-for-mr-biswas-trinidad-novel
Lively, funny and malicious, Naipaul’s 1961 novel is the story of a man who claws his way free of abject poverty, fighting his in-laws at every turn. It’s an ecstatic evocation of Caribbean life<p>A <em>House for Mr Biswas</em> is episodic and packed with conflict. Mr Biswas subverts heroic convention: he is smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean and unsympathetic. His enemies, who are mostly his relatives, are largely unlikable, but they also have their admirable moments. The narrative of the novel is&nbsp;propelled by a clear goal – the acquisition of the titular house – which, it becomes apparent, can only be achieved by the most exhaustively circuitous route. It is a novel of epic length, formal perfection, and contains two notable peculiarities: its setting, which, being domestic, is unusual for an epic; and its geographical location, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/trinidad-and-tobago" title="">Trinidad</a>, an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage. And yet, this severely delimited context gave VS Naipaul an entire world of experience and feeling on which to draw. <em>A House for Mr Biswas</em>, published in 1961, is one of the imperishable novels of the 20th century.</p><p>From his birth until his untimely death 46 years later, Mr Biswas mostly lives in a series of houses that either do&nbsp;not belong to him or are houses unworthy of the name. Each of these houses is for Mr Biswas an attempt at solving a problem, and each is a wrong answer in&nbsp;a different way. Mr Biswas is like a&nbsp;figure out of myth – and indeed his birth is attended by negative portents and dour prophecies; he is declared to&nbsp;be “born in the wrong way”, seems doomed to live through each of these futile iterations before his destiny can&nbsp;be complete. The pointlessness and the&nbsp;wasted effort of these dead-end attempts give the novel a comic edge that links it both to picaresque and to the existentialist tradition.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/08/100-best-novels-bend-in-the-river-vs-naipaul-review">The 100 best novels: No 90 – A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/teju-cole-vs-naipaul-a-house-for-mr-biswas-trinidad-novel">Continue reading...</a>VS NaipaulFictionBooksCultureTrinidad and TobagoAmericasWorld newsFri, 12 Feb 2016 10:00:16 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/teju-cole-vs-naipaul-a-house-for-mr-biswas-trinidad-novelPhotograph: Debra Wiseberg/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Debra Wiseberg/Getty ImagesTeju Cole2016-02-12T10:00:16ZAli Smith on Trumpet by Jackie Kay: a jazzy call to actionhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/rereading-trumpet-jackie-kay-ali-smith
<p>Based on the real life story of an American musician, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, an examination of when private life turns horribly public, says things about gender and ethnicity that had never been said before</p><p>This novel, with its brightly proclamatory title, a title promising loudness, confident statement, irrefutable presence and exuberance, even a kind of jazzy brashness or biblical heft, begins in immediate contradiction with a notable quietness, a state of wounded and private withdrawal. The first thing it does is reveal someone hiding behind closed curtains, peeking fearfully out, keen not to be seen. “House and Home” is the title of its opening section. Pretty soon we gather that “House and Home” is meant in the sense of a typical media heading, like a style section in a newspaper, and that intense media observation in the form of a small crowd of paparazzi has left the person feeling invaded, hunted, “strange”. “Each time I look at the photographs in the papers, I look unreal.”</p><p>She – a few pages on we find out that the speaker is a woman – feels guilty, even vaguely criminal. So what has she done to merit feeling like this? Has there been a death? Is there a scandal? The novel begins with this forced unhoming, from both the house and the self (“I am not myself any longer … I crept out of my house in the middle of the night with a thief’s racing heart”). Pretty soon it becomes clear that “House and Home” stands for a clash between the private and public worlds, and that this clash raises questions about how we calculate what’s real and what’s imagined about ourselves, and what’s allowed and forbidden too. This is just the start – a&nbsp;human, very vulnerable start, and sure enough, this extraordinary novel, which came out nearly 20 years ago, will be in the end very much about homecoming, home truths.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/27/life-writing-jackie-kay">A life in writing: Jackie Kay</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/rereading-trumpet-jackie-kay-ali-smith">Continue reading...</a>Jackie KayBooksCultureSat, 16 Jan 2016 14:00:35 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/rereading-trumpet-jackie-kay-ali-smithPhotograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/Frantzesco Kangaris for The GuardianPhotograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/Frantzesco Kangaris for The GuardianAli Smith2016-01-16T14:00:35Z